Monday, April 28, 2014

I don’t remember when Ruski first came into the house. I
remember sitting in a chair by the fireplace with the front door open and he
saw me from fifty feet away and ran up, giving the special little squeaks I
never heard from another cat, and jumped into my lap, nuzzling and purring and
putting his little paws up to my face, telling me he wanted to be my cat.

But I didn’t hear him.

There were three kittens born at the Stone House. The mother
was a small black-and-white cat. Obviously the big white cat was the father.
One kitten was an albino. The other two were predominantly white, except for
their tails and paws, which were brown to black. The big gray male looked after
the kittens as if they were his own. He was gray like Ruski, except for a white
chest and stomach. I named him Horatio. He was a noble, manly cat, and had a
strong, sweet nature.

Ruski hated the little cats. He was the cute little cat. They were interlopers. The one time I
slapped Ruski was for attacking one of the kittens, and I have seen the mother
drive him out of the barn when the kittens were there. And Ruski was terrified
of Horatio. One evening on the back porch Horatio walked over to Ruski(he wasn’t Ruski then. I didn’t yet know he
was a Russian Blue, I called him Smokey.) He walked over in a casual but
determined manner and lit into Smoke, who ran under the table.

I have observed that in cat fights the aggressor is almost always
the winner. If a cat is getting the worst of a fight he doesn’t hesitate to
run, whereas a dog may fight to his stupid death.As my old jiujitsu instructor said, “If your
trick no work, better run.”

June 3, 1982. Perhaps I should do one of those sprightly ‘fixing
up my country house” books. ... First
Year in the Garden ... a chapter on the White Cat who got his ass
bit by a dog, and the gray cat ...such
a handsome animal. Smokey we call him, after Colonel Smokey, the narc in
Maurice Helbrant’s Narcotic Agent, bound
with Junkie in the Ace edition ...
well, Smokey is getting to be a real nuisance, fawning all over me and putting
his face up to mine, rubbing his head against my hand and following me around
when I am trying to shoot. It’s almost spooky. I am looking to find a good home
for Smokey.

A Nazi initiation into the upper reaches of the SS was to
gouge out the eye of a pet cat and cuddling it for a month. This exercise was
designed to eliminate all traces of pity-poison and mold a full Ubermensch. There is a sound magical
postulate involved: the practitioner achieves superhuman status be performing
some atrocious, revolting, subhuman act. In Morocco, magic men gain power by
eating their own excrement.

But dig out Ruski’s eyes? Stack bribes to the radioactive
sky. What does it profit a man? I could not occupy a body that could dig out
Ruski’s eyes. So who gained the whole
world? I didn’t. Any bargain involving exchange of qualitative values like animal
love for quantitative advantage is not only dishonorable, as wrong as a man can
get, it is also foolish. Because you
get nothing. You have sold your you.

“Well, how does that beautiful young red-haired body grab
you?” Yes, He will always find a sucker like Faust, to sell his soul for a
strap-on. You want adolescent sex, you have to pay for it in adolescent fear,
shame, confusion. In order to enjoy something you have to be there. You can’t
just sweep in from desert, dearie.

I remember the one time I ever slapped Ruski for attacking
one of the kittens. The way he looked at me, the shock and hurt, was identical
with the look I got from my amigo Kiki. I was sleepy and petulant. He came in
and started pushing at me, and I finally slapped him. In both cases I had to
make amends. Ruski disappeared but I knew where he was. I went out to the barn
and found him and brought him back. Kiki sat there with a tear in the corner of
his eye. I apologized and finally he came around.

Fifteen years ago I dreamt I had caught a white cat on a
hook and line. For some reason I was about to reject the creature and throw it
back, but it rubbed against me, mewling piteously.

Reading over these notes, which were simply a journal of my
year at the Stone House, I am absolutely appalled. So often, looking over my
past life, I exclaim: “My God, who is this?” Seen from here I appear as a most
unsightly cartoon of someone who is awful enough to begin with ...
simpering, complacent, callous . . . “Got his ass bit by a dog.” “Leaving one
feeling vaguely guilty” ... “like an Arab boy who knows he is being
naughty” ...snippy old English queen voice ... “I
am looking to find a good home for Smokey.”

I don’t think anyone could write a completely honest
autobiography. I am sure no one could bear to read it: My Past Was an Evil River.

There are crucial moments in any relationship, turning
points. I had been away for ten days at Naropa. During my absence Bill Rich
went out every day to feed the cats.

I have returned. Late afternoon on the back porch. I see
Ruski and he moves away. Then he rolls on his side, tentative, not quite sure.
I scoop him up and sit down on the edge of the porch. There is a clear moment
when he recognizes me and begins squeaking and purring and nuzzling. In that
moment I finally know he is my cat, and decide to take him when I leave the
Stone House.

Since I adopted Ruski, the cat dreams are vivid and
frequent. Often I dream that Ruski has jumped onto my bed. Of course this
sometimes happens, and Fletch is a constant visitor, jumping up on the bed and
cuddling against me, purring so loud I can’t sleep.

The Land of the Dead ... A reek of boiling sewage,
coal gas and burning plastics ...oil patches .. . roller coasters and Ferris wheels
overgrown with rank weeds and vines. I can’t find Ruski. I am calling his name
... “Ruski! Ruski! Ruski!”

A deep feeling of sadness and foreboding.

“I shouldn’t have brought him out here!”

I wake up with tears streaming down my face.

Notes from early 1985: my connection with Ruski is a basic
factor in my life. Whenever I travel, someone Ruski knows and trusts must come
and live in the house to look after him and call the vet if anything goes
wrong. I will cover any expense.

When Ruski was in the hospital with pneumonia I called every
few hours. I remember once there was a long pause and the doctor came on to
say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Burroughs” ... the grief and desolation that closed around
me. But he was only apologizing for the long wait ... “Ruski
is doing fine ... temperature down ...I
think he is going to make it.” And my elation the following morning. “Down to
almost normal. Another day and he can come home.”

August 9, 1984, Thursday. My relationship with my cats has
saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance. When a barn cat finds a human
patron who will elevate him to a house cat, he tends to overdo it in the only
way he knows; by purring and nuzzling and rubbing and rolling on his back to
call attention to himself. Now I find this extremely touching and ask how I
could ever have found it a nuisance. All relationships are predicated on
exchange, and every service has its price. When a cat is sure of his position,
as Ruski is now, he becomes less demonstrative, which is as it should be.

James was downtown at Seventh and Massachusetts when he
heard a cat mewing very loudly as if in pain. He went over to see what was
wrong and the little black cat leapt into his arms. He brought it back to the house
and when I started to open a tin of cat food the little beast jumped up onto
the sideboard and rushed at the can. He ate himself out of shape, shit the
litter box full, then shit on the rug. I have named him Fletch. He is all flash
and glitter and charm, gluttony transmuted by innocence and beauty. Fletch, the
little black foundling, is an exquisite, delicate animal with glistening black
fur, a sleek black head like an otter’s, slender and sinuous, with green eyes.

I kept Fletch in the house for five days lest he run away,
and when we let him out he scuttled forty feet up a tree. The scene has a touch
of Rousseau’s Carnival Evening ... a
smoky moon, teenagers eating spun sugar, lights across the midway, a blast of
circus music and Fletch is forty feet up and won’t come down. Shall I call the
fire department? Then Ruski goes up the tree and brings Fletch down.

A year later Ruski’s son by Calico Jane is stuck up the same
tree. It is getting dark. I can see him up there with my flashlight, but he won’t
come down, so I all Wayne Propst, who is coming with a ladder. I go out and
shine my light up the tree and see Fletch’s red collar. And Fletch brings the
little cat down.

An English cat hater of the upper classes confidedto me that he had trained a dog to break a
cat’s back in one shake. And I remember he caught sight of a cat at a party and
snarled out through the long yellow horse teeth that crowded out his mouth, “Nasty
stinking little beast!” I was impressed by his class at the time and knew
nothing of cats. Now I would get up from my chair and say, “Pawdon me, old
thing, if I toddle along, but there’s a nasty stinking big beast here.”

I will take this occasion to denounce and excoriate the vile
English practice of riding to the hounds. So the sodden huntsmen can watch a
beautiful, delicate fox torn to pieces by their stinking dogs. Heartened by
this loutish spectacle, they repair to the manor house to get drunker than thy
already are, no better than their filthy, fawning, shit-eating, carrion-rolling,
baby-killing beasts.

Warning to all young couples who are expecting a blessed event:
Get rid of that family dog. .. .

This cat book is an allegory, in which the writer’s past
life is presented to him in a cat charade. Not that the cats are puppets. Far
from it. They are living, breathing creatures, and when any other being is
contacted, it is sad: because you see the limitations, the pain and fear and
the final death. That is what contact means. That is what I see when I touch a
cat and find that tears are flowing down my face.

April 2, 1985. Ruski is on the desk by the north window. I
pet him. Her squeaks and nuzzles me and goes to sleep. I feel his sad, lost
voice in my throat, stirring, aching. When you feel grief like that, tears
streaming down your face, it is always a portent, a warning – danger ahead.

May 1, 1985. A feeling of deep sadness is always a warning
to be heeded. It may refer to events which will happen in weeks, months, even
years. In this case exactly one month.

Yesterday I walked up to the house on Nineteenth Street, depression
and pain dragging every step. Ruski has not been to the house this morning.

I received Ruski’s desperate call for help, the sad,
frightened voice I first heard a month ago.

MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY

I know where he is. I call the Humane Society.

“No. We have no cat of that description”

“Are you sure?”

“Wait, let me check again . . . (Cries of frightened animals.)

“Well, yes, we do have a cat of that description.”

“I’ll e right there.”

“Well, you have to go to the city clerk with your certificate
for rabies vaccination and pay a ten-dollar pick-up fee.”

All this is accomplished in half an hour with the aid of
David Ohle. We arrive at the animal shelter. The place is a death camp, haunted
by the plaintive, despairing cries of lost cats waiting to be put to sleep.

“That is one scared cat!” the girl says as she leads me to
the “Holding,” as it is called. Frozen with fear, Ruski cowers with another
terrified cat on a steel shelf. She unlocks the door. I reach in and gently
lift my cat into his box.

After seventy-two hours in Holding, the animals are put up
for adoption. The animals know. Animals always know death when they see it.
Better put your best paw forward. It’s your last chance, Kitty.

What chance would Ruski have, a full-grown, unneutered cat
paralyzed with fear? One scared cat.

“Oh, Daddy, I want that one!” Little boy points to Ruski.

“Well, we wouldn’t advise ... he’s not very responsive.”

“Guess we’ll pass on that one, Punky.”

Ruski gives a meow of despair as they walk on.

I question the underlying assumption that one does a cat a
favor by killing him ... oh, sorry ... I mean “putting him to sleep.”
Turn to backward countries that don’t have Humane Societies for a simple
alternative. In Tangier stray cats fend for themselves. I remember an eccentric
old English lady in Tangier. Every morning she went to the fish market and
filled a bag with cheap fish and made the rounds of vacant lots and other locales
where stray cats congregated. I have seen as many as thirty cats rush up at her
approach.

Well, why not? The money now spent on caging and killing
cats could maintain actual shelters with food dispensers. Of course the cats
would have to be neutered and vaccinated for rabies.

That night, for the first time in three years, Ruski jumped
onto my bed purring and chittering, nuzzled against me and went to sleep
thanking me for saving him.

Next day I called Animal Control. “My cat was picked up and
taken to the shelter and I want to know the circumstances.”

“The circumstances are that it’s illegal to let your cat run
free.”

“No, I mean how did my cat happen to be picked up?”

It seems he was caught in an animal trap, about two hundred
yards from the back line of my property. Probably he had been shut in the box
trap all night. No wonder he was a scared cat.

At the time I didn’t know about animal traps. I didn’t know
that cats could be picked up. Close. Very close. Suppose I had been away.
Suppose . . . I don’t want to. It hurts. Now all my cats wear rabies tags.

The cry I heard through Ruski was not only his signal of
distress. It was a sad, plaintive voice of lost spirits, the grief that comes
from knowing you are the last of your kind. There can be no witness to this
grief. No witnesses remain. It must have happened many times in the past. It is
happening now. Endangered species. Not just those that actually exist, or existed
at one time and died, but all the creatures that might have existed.

A hope, a chance. The chance lost. The hope dying. A cry
following the only one who could hear it when he is already too far away to
hear, an aching wrenching sadness. This is a grief without witness. “You are the
last. Last human crying.” The cry is very old. Very few can hear it. Very
painful. The chance was there for an enchanted moment. The chance was lost.
Wrong turn, Wrong time. Too soon. Too late. To invoke all-out magic is to risk
the terrible price of failure. To know that chance was lost because you failed.
This grief can kill.

Life, such as it is, goes on. Dillon’s is still open from
seven a.m. to twelve midnight, seven days a week.

I am the cat who
walks alone. To me all supermarkets are alike.

I am drinking Dillon’s fresh-squeezed orange juice and
eating farm-fresh eggs out of an egg cup I bought in Amsterdam. Wimpy rolls,
nuzzling my feet, purring I love you I love
you I love you. He loves me.

Meeeowww. “Hello
Bill.”

The distance from there to here is the measure of what I
have learned from cats.

All you cat lovers, remember all the millions of cats mewling
through the world’s rooms lay all their hopes and trust in you, as the little
mother cat at the Stone House laid her head in my hand, as Calico Jane put her
babies in my suitcase, as Fletch jumped into James’ arms and Ruski rushed
towards me chittering with joy.

We are the cats
inside. We are the cats who cannot walk alone, and for us there is only one
place.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

That summer (1983) at Naropa, Bill was asked by Allen
Ginsberg to provide a reading list for his students. He listed more than one
hundred books plus “the complete works” of Kafka. Genet, and Fitzgerald. He
handed the pages to Allen. Allen was outraged and stamped his feet, accusing
Burroughs of simply listing everything he had on his bookshelf.

“What’s this?”
he demanded, pointing to Intern by
Doctor X.

“That, Allen, is a doctor book. I assure you it’s a very
good one.” Bill spoke quietly, as if talking to a recalcitrant student.

“But they can’t read all these,” fumed Allen.

“They are the books I like,” said Bill, pursing his lips.

“Where’s Kerouac?” demanded Allen. William did not reply,
just placed his fingers together and pursed his lips some more, biding his
time. Allen knew better than to argue and the list was duly photocopied and
distributed for Bill’s class.

Burroughs had never thought much of Kerouac’s actual
writing, and had always been irritated by Kerouac’s various portrayal’s of him
as well as the way that he was lumped together with him by the critics, Allen
Ginsberg included, who often assumed that Kerouac was an influence on his work.
“I said that he had an influence in encouraging me to write, not an influence
on what I wrote . […] So far as our style of work and content, we couldn’t be
more opposite. He always said that the first draft was the best. I said, ‘Well,
that may work for you, Jack, but it doesn’t work for me.’ I’m used to writing
and rewriting things at least three times. It’s just a completely different way
of working.”

Burroughs also depended upon his friends to assist when it came time for the final draft.
James Grauerholz worked long and hard to knock the manuscript of Cities of the Red Night into shape.
Allen Ginsberg played an important role in shaping both Junky and Queer, and
worked on the early drafts of The Naked
Lunch. The Naked Lunch itself was
typed and shaped largely by Brion Gysin and Sinclair Beiles while Bill stuck
photos of the Peruvian jungle on the wall and shot at them with his air gun. The Soft Machine was assembled and
edited entirely by Ginsberg and Gysin while Burroughs was in Tangier, and Ian
Sommerville had a lot to do with both The
Ticket That Exploded and Nova Express.
This is how Burroughs always worked.All
Burrough’s major books are fugitive. No fixed text seems possible, each version
points up different aspects of Burrough’s vision, and ultimately they have to
be seen as one giant multivolume book including all the different versions.

Years of research and work on Cities of the Red Night gave Burroughs six hundred pages of
material to use as a starter for The Place
of Dead Roads. In April 1984 he told the East Village Eye that the new book was well under way. “The
overflow from Dead Roads was about 7-800 pages. I always had material to draw
on for the next one. So in a sense the next one is well under way by the time I
finish the one I am doing. […] I never know what’s going to happen. I don’t
plan the novel out. I don’t even have any idea how this novel I’m writing is
going to end or where it’s going from where it is now, or how much of that
material will be useable.”

In the last years of his life Burroughs began painting. He
had no formal art training, but felt that maybe that was a good thing given his
way of approaching art. “There might be something on my mind, I try to just let
my hand do it, to see with my hand. And then look at it, see what has happened.
I may see quite clearly in there something that I’ve seen recently in a
magazine or a newspaper, whatever, emerging. I can’t consciously draw anything.
I can’t draw a recognizable chair – it looks like a four-year-old’s.” The
initial “killing of the canvas,” making random marks to overcome the tyranny of
the white rectangle, provided the subject matter; in among the whorls of paint,
a subject emerged. “I don’t know what I’m painting until I see it. In fact I’ve
done a lot with my eyes closed. The point was to get started.

It was the ‘surprised recognition” that Burroughs was after.
“It applies to any art form. That’s what I try to do in painting. Klee said a
painter strives to create something that has an existence apart from him and
which could endanger him. Now the most clear proof of something being separate
is if it can harm you. […] I do think all writers, many other writers and painters
are trying to create something that has an existence apart from themselves. It
would literally step out of the picture or the book. So all artists are trying
to achieve what some people would say is impossible, that is to create life. Of
course, impossible is a meaningless word to me.”

This fits in with Burrough’s cut-in theory: the recognition
of connections between phrases suggested by a random process; with his occult
experiments with crystal balls; with the random cut-ins on his tape
experiments; and with the emerging images from random visual events. “That’s
what it’s all about. The way that clear representational objects will emerge
from what would seem to be a random procedure.”

In many ways Burrough’s art was a self-exploratory process.
According to Allen Ginsberg, Burrough’s use of sex, for example, was to explore
his own sexual position, “rehearsing it over and over again, to sort of take it
outside himself, exteriorize it on the page and repeat it over and over again
in a mechanical way in different forms until his obsessive neurotic images lose
their magnetic, hypnotic attraction or their conditioned attraction and become
common-place.”This is somewhat similar to and
helps explain Burroughs long-time attraction to Scientology which he explained
has a system of therapy called ‘clearing’ in which you ‘run’ traumatic material
which they call ‘engrams’ until it loses its emotional connotation through repetitions
and is then refilled with neutral memory.”

The role of drugs in Burrough’s life and art cannot be
overemphasized. From the mid-forties, when his nostalgie de la boue led him to the criminal circles where he became
addicted to morphine, he was involved in the drug subculture. Though not always
addicted, he was rarely sober from then on: all his books were written on
marijuana, which he used through-out his lifetime, and/or opiates. Despite his
frequent claims to the contrary, much of of the original material in The Naked Lunch was written while he was
heavily addicted to Eukodol, a form of morphine, and everything written after
his return to the United States in 1974 was written on opiates; he switched to
the methadone program for the last seventeen years of his life. He also drank a
good deal, sometimes lapsing into alcoholism. Drugs were an enormously
important part of his life: they were an all-consuming interest and also the subject
of most of his writing. He was ambivalent about them, on and off, for and
against, for much of his life, but in old age he felt that becoming a junkie
was the best thing he ever did, because without it he would not have written
The Naked Lunch or encountered the demimonde of underground characters that
populate his work.

Burroughs did not live a happy life; he was plagued by
loneliness and lack of love, racked with guilt, not just over the death of his
wife, but for his neglect of friends and family. But to those in Lawrence,
Kansas, where he spent the last years of his life, he was an inspirational presence.
He had a lot of advice for young men. He wasn’t a softy but he was really warm
and likable. He had an endearing manner and retained his mental agility to the
end.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

The genocide of the Jews was not a plan that ran amok but a
decisive effort by the Nazi leadership. It was a project that was considered
vital for Germany’s survival and essential for the Third Reich’s victory.
Therefore it was central both politically and administratively. It was a goal
that Hitler and his closest allies did not think they could afford to lose
sight of – a goal they pursued with even greater zeal in step with the growing
problems at the fronts, and with even greater vigor as the more or less
voluntary allies of the Third Reich became less and less enthusiastic about
their role in this barbarous endeavor.

In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen published an extensive study of
the general public’s knowledge of and involvement in the implementation of the
Holocaust. Hitler’s Willing Executioners is
a disturbing account because Goldhagen shows how many Germans were implicated
in the nefarious project. But it is especially disturbing because it reveals
chauvinism’s roots in Germany, and how appallingly widespread the thinking was
that led to the mass extermination of fellow citizens. It shows how deeply the
problem was rooted in the general population, who allowed themselves to put so
much credence in the systematic description of the Jews as a threatening
foreign body that they lost their basic compassion and empathy – the starting
points for all peaceful coexistence.

Goldhagen makes little mention of the few exceptions where
the Holocaust failed – such as Bulgaria and Denmark. His focus is on the
general picture and the underlying driving forces, and he concludes: “the destruction
of the Jews, once it had become achievable, took priority even over
safeguarding Nazism’s very existence.” The extermination continued to the
bitter end, long after it was clear that the Third Reich would be defeated.

The German historian Peter Longerich has a somewhat
different interpretation. He agrees with many of Goldhagen’s observations, but
gives different answers when it comes to what the German population knew – or avoided
knowing. In Longerich’s interpretation the Jewish extermination was an open
secret. All the elements were commonly known, and anyone had the opportunity to
recognize mass murder as the objective, and to know about the scope of the
genocide. But that still does not mean that most Germans knew what was going on.
Longerich believes that most closed their eyes and ears and shied away from seeing
the scale of the criminality, and many protected themselves against the sense
that insight entailed responsibility. It
was clear that something was going on, and that everyone suspected the worse.
But Longerich’s point is that the majority wanted anything but the
transformation of their fears into certain knowledge: “Between knowledge and
ignorance, there was a broad gray area marked by rumors and half –truths, fantasy,
forced and self-imposed limitations in communication. It lies between not
wanting to know and not being able to understand.”

In one crucial point, the Nazi action in Denmark
distinguishes itself clearly from all previous raids and actions against Jews
initiated elsewhere; in Denmark it took place under the eyes of an immensely
indignant and protective society, while the Swedish press delivered live coverage.
This is exactly why the Nazis apparatus failed in the case of Denmark.

What ultimately stopped the extermination of Jews on Danish
soil was the expressed and entrenched Danish opposition to the project. The many
protests from high and low, from church and business, from politicians and
state secretaries, confirmed what local Nazi administrators had long known and
told Berlin: there was a deeply rooted aversion in the Danish population to the
idea of introducing special laws and measures against the Jews. Since 1933 the
Danish government had forcefully rejected any attempt to create a divide between
Danes based on descent. Rather, those who attacked democracy had been excluded
from the national “us,” while the leading politicians succeeded in equating the
nation with the values its social order rested upon. This adherence to humanism
became a bulwark its social order rested upon. Even cooperation with the occupying
power had not undermined the Danish government’s attitude toward the concrete
requirements of humanity and love thy neighbor. An unarmed people rebelled
against a power with all kinds of tricks, with adventurous artifice and
disguise and courage – but first and foremost with solidarity of deep
indignation. By completely rejecting the ideas that excluded the Jews from the
national “us”, Denmark deprived the Nazis of the fig leaf they needed to justify
discrimination and legitimize the deed.

Hannah Arendt, in her 1964 book on the trial of Adolf
Eichmann wrote: “politically and psychologically, the most interesting aspect
of this incident is perhaps the role played by the German authorities in
Denmark, their obvious sabotage of orders from Berlin. It is the only case we
know of in which the Nazi met with open native resistance, and the result seems
to have been that those exposed to it changed their minds.They themselves apparently no longer looked
upon the extermination of a whole people as a matter of course. They hadmet resistance based on principle, and their ‘toughness”
had melted like butter in the sun, they had even been able to show a few timid
beginnings of genuine courage.”

Today, Hannah Arendt’s observations can be taken even
further, as it is clear that the orders from Berlin were also softened in
relation to the Jews in Denmark. It turns out that even leading Nazis in Berlin
and Copenhagen needed the local understanding and support that would give the
crime an aura of necessity and justice. Without this even the most hardened Nazis
shrank back. Public participation was therefore not only a practical condition
for the implementation of the project; its support was also a prerequisite for
leading Nazis’ daring to set atrocities in motion. Even these experienced Nazis
with blood on their hands ( e.g. Eichmann, Himmler, Ribbentrop) could not or
would not go all the way alone. Even they depended on the understanding and
support of the project, which was absolutely missing in Denmark. Without it
they faltered, and extermination of the Jews came to appear as a goal; that had
to be weighed against other, more practical considerations.

The leading Nazis’s complicity in making the flight of
Denmark’s Jews to Sweden possible suggests they were led by practical considerations.
In the Danish context, continued cooperation with the ‘model protectorate’ and
maintaining the flow or agricultural and mineral supplies weighed more heavily
than the desire to annihilate the Jews.

Senior Nazis involvement was not driven by personal necessity.
Hatred of the different was not some primordial force that was unleashed.
Rather, it was a political convenience that could be used as needed and in most
occupied territories the Nazis followed their interest in pursuing this with
disastrous consequences. But without a sounding board- chauvinism and the refusal
to transform fears into certain knowledge- the strategy did not work. It could
be countered by simple means – even by a country that was defenseless and
occupied- by a persistent national rejection
assumption that there was a “Jewish problem” and politicians who refuse to use suspicion of ‘the
other’ as their political tool.

The escape of the Danish Jews happened because they acted on
their own initiative when warned of the impending threat against them. The
hesitation of the Nazi leadership in Berlin and their officials in Denmark was
caused primarily by the expectation of the Danish reaction and its negative
ramifications for both the ‘model protectorate’ and the continued shipment of
Danish provisions to Germany. But what made this possible, before anything
else, was the fact that Danish society as a whole had so quickly, so
consistently, and with such determination turned against the very idea underpinning
the persecution of their fellow countrymen, and mobilized with utmost unity of
purpose to facilitate their rescue. Their attitude and capacity to overcome
their fears was anchored in the preceding ten years of anti-totalitarian Danish
politics. The miraculous escape of the Danish Jews cannot be fully understood
outside that political context.

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

If this were were a Tuesday we would have a 2-1 chance of
being less solitary on our green garden seat, where laziness and no work has
tempted us to remain chatting or somnolent since breakfast time. A couple, at
least, of small round tin tables would be set in the shade of the acacia trees,
and peasants in sable dress – black boots, black trousers, black blouses, black
hats, black beards, black eyes - would be seated drinking coffee from long
glasses, or beer –enlivened by a dose of carbolic acid gas in Potato’s bottling
establishment over the road –or red wine which is brought in casks from vineyards
lying twenty miles to the south. The country reckons little of those strange aperatifs of the French town-dweller,
those drinks of daring hue and astonishing taste which are used either to
appetize or to minimize the results of appetizing; like the device of an
impecunious young man who used to calm his tailor’s clamors for settlement by
ordering more clothes. At one of the tables of funereally clad peasants a
jaundiced-faced townsman, dressed in straw hat, tail coats and trousers of
black and white check, would be talking earnestly and with authority. The peasants
are litigants, the townsman a barrister. They would be waiting, we would be
waiting, for the juge de paix. Najac
is a chef-lieu-de canton, we have our fortnightly courts.

The juge de paix
comes presently, round about half-past ten, walking with the jerky decision of
celebrity. He looks not unlike Monsieur Poincare, but it is a Monsieur Poincare
drawn by Tenniel for Alice in Wonderland,
and the aggressive eyebrows of the French first minister are here pruned into
gentleness. We all get up an follow him in a ragged procession to the corner of
the triangular place and thence downhill a dozen buildings to the Mairie. The juge de paix is not quite the equivalent
of our Justice of the Peace, he is more domestic: nor does he handle crime.
Judge of the peace indeed he is not:he
is a human olive branch; his crest is a dove; his very questions – curious, naïve
legal questions, French equivalents for the famous “Who is Connie Gilchrist?” –
have a coo in them.

Maupassant has immortalized the juge de paix in Le Cas de
Madame Luneau and Tribunaux Rustique.
To an English reader these rustic comedies of law may appear exaggerations,
yet although Maupassant died thirty years ago, and although in these thirty
years the world has made unbelievable advances, our juge de paix might well have taken lessons from those invented by
the French novelist. The judge’s opening in Tribunaux
Rustiques,“Madame Bascule,
articulez vos griefs,” would seem to us at first glance written for farce had
our juge de paix not used the
identical phrase often enough: so, too, the judge’s exaggerated simplicity in La cas de Madame Luneau.

As a general rule the juge
de paix does not hold that serious angle to the law which we would consider
correct in an English magistrate. To some extent the judge seems to take both
the law he is administering as well as the pleader as a kind of joke; he is
like a humorous master settling a difference between a cook and a housemaid,
neither of whomhe is willing to loose.
Contrasting with this humor, sometimes tart on the part of the judge, is the
ceremony of the court in which these rough-handed litigants – some of who can
only speak in patois, losing themselves in long-winded explanations – are dubbed
officially le Sieur Lachose or le Sieur Untel; and the judge sometimes uses
these pretentious sounding titles to whip up his satire.

To add to the strange quality of these village courts of
justice is the passionate eloquence of the barristers. These are two as a rule,
brought at some expense from Francheville, one a stolid rustic sort of a man
who does generally confine himself top a blunt exposition of his clients case:
the other, the most admired, the tail-coated, rather jaundiced individual
before mentioned. He has a gift for pathos – and bathos too. Eloquence in
France is a serious affair. The oration of Sergeant Buzfuz for Mrs. Bardell
pales before some of the jaundiced barrister’s copia verborum dealing with the matter of a branch illegally cut
from a tree or a gate left swinging open from malice: to hear him on the
depredations of an errant goat was to be flooded with as much emotion as would
have served many an actor for Mark Anthony weeping over the body of Caesar.

The council chamber has a large green baize-covered table at
which the councilors of the village seat themselves solemnly and do their
simple best to retard progress. Here generally one can find Raymond asleep, his
bulging forehead couched upon a pile of municipal literature, snoring away his
2000 francs per annum. The chamber of justice is small and white-washed. A
railing divides it in two, on the far side of which is the judge’s table, also
green covered, raised on a dais. To his left a lower table serves the clerk of
the court by whose side a couple of chairs seat the barristers, who here plead
without robes or bands. Nor does the judge himself mount signs of office, he
sits rather plumply rubicund, half bored, half sardonic, with a large wen just
appearing where his hair is thinning. There are chairs, half a dozen or so, at
the disposal of an audience, but usually there is no audience. The litigants gather
on the landing of the Mairie, and creep bashfully as their names are called by
the greffier.

“Le Sieur Anselm Chose contre Madame Paulette Maschin, “
etc.

The litigants are of several varieties. There is the chronic
plaintiff, usually a woman; there is the chronic defendant, usually a man. Both
are egoists, the first too conscious of her neighbor’s vices, the second too
unconscious of his neighbor’s rights. A type of the first was remarkable enough
to be worthy of notice. She was an ex-nun who had left her convent to marry,
but who has remained a devotional bigot. She was a lank, lean woman, with a
pallid face ridged like plough land and two black pearls of eyes. She crossed
herself whenever she passed the Hotel Sestrol because Raymond had said in jest
that he and his family were atheists; but not Christian charity disturbed her conscience. She snapped into law at the
slightest pretext, the terror of her neighbors.

Both types of litigants are well known to the juge de paix, who greets them with a
rough grunt something like that of a hoarse pig:

“Euh, euh! Qu'est-ce
que vous ronge cette fois-ci.”

There is the litigant who talks as though there can be no
question on the other side, and the litigant who hardly dares to state his own
case; there is the amicable litigant who can be seen drinking with his opponent
before entering the Mairie and who has another drink with him to toasty the decision
whichever way it may be; there is the sly litigant who tries clownishly to hide
the essential facts, but who is almost invariably brought to book with acid
comments by monsieur le juge; there is the hysterical witness; the silent
witness; the loquacious. To all the judge is a sort of legal Father O’Flynn,
sometimes forced to translate his decisions into patois when his suitors cannot
understand the French. But often the litigants who do know French are unable to
understand the legal form of the judge’s summing up and stand silent, perplexed
and gaping at the bar until the greffier
chases them on to the landing; where they still hang about wondering how things have actually been decided between them.

The more serious village affairs do not come before the juge
de paiz, they go to the tribunal at Francheville. Sometimes, however, the judge
is an echo of the Francheville court, for instance, in the case of assault, the
victim pleads for damages in the village after the aggressor has been punished
officially in town. Thus the aggressorpays double law expenses. Yet murder did come to us, both present and
past. A girl of eighteen, turned out by her uncle, having given birth all
alone hidden in a hayloft, strangled her illegitimate child. The baker was
furious. He waved his thin fingers under the nose of Potato ( a local bottler,
the blacksmith’s brother)who being fat, was inclined to leniency. The baker,
who had smashed a comrade’s foot for a careless insult, was self-righteously
indignant with this half-distraught baby killer.

“We must finish with these self-taken liberties,” he coughed
hoarsely. “No pity. Off with her head.”

But she was acquitted. The French look with what appears to
the English a lenient eye upon murder. Murder they seem to consider a crime
only in dastardly cases. Give murder an epithet, tag it on to some perturbation
of spirit, and the slayer escapes. Love, jealousy, hate, anger, fear, political
passion, or even commercial interest, are held to be spiritual cyclones which
acting on normal humanity can whirl it outside itself –beside himself, as we
say – and so a crime committed outside of humanity is considered almost outside
the law.

A curious feature of psychology this, that these French who
are so primitively mosaic in their politics – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth – should have travelled so far away from that boasted basis of human
security, a life for a life. They do not hold that a misdeed committed in
individual frenzy is to be balanced by another misdeed committed in communal
revenge; they do not hold that for murder, the last unpardonable theft, restitution
can be made by a forfeiture in kind. Still, we
must think the French very lenient in murder. It was a question of café debate
whether Landru, the modern Bluebeard, would not get off. A barrister, playing
with his eloquence upon the heart-strings of a jury –which one must confess
often seems to carry emotionalism beyond the limits of even a farce- has
released how many assassins back into society. It is true that murder rarely
becomes a habit. But we remember a satirical article in a French paper proving
the only person one might not murder with impunity to be a total stranger,
since no sentimental excuse could be found for murdering him. ..

The juge de paix
at Najac does not touch on such grave matters as these. He travels from canton
to canton, an affable, slightly pompous, slightly sardonic, peace-maker, an
ambulating olive branch dipped in vinegar.